April 27, 2008

For Our Reflection:
She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church?
I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
And I think all the other folks did too.
They come to church to share God, not find God. -- Alice Walker

Beyond the Shadow: The Creed of a Modern Thomas
An Internal Dialogue Externalized

Tell me what it is that you know for certain.

Do you know - beyond the shadow
of a doubt - what love is?
Can you tell me - eye witness to murder -
about O.J.'s guilt or innocence?

Speak the truth for every ear to hear -
   has Messiah arrived at last?
   is the Resurrection real?
   will I survive beyond the Valley of the Shadow
         of Death
     if I incant the words you say responsively?

Solve this Mystery for me -
can Intelligent Design be so fragile
that selective extinction by pollution
is the only solution
to ignorance and self-absorption
contradicting the understatement
of random evolution?

Tell me EVERYTHING -
tell me the ONE thing -
  that has been revealed to you
   frozen in the searchlights
     of your intellect -
proven by the unquestionable evidence
  of your photo-graphic visions
    R.E.M. that sustains the possibility
     of re-membering the facts -
just the facts, so help you God.

Lay out the fragments of all our unoriginal thoughts
excavated from ancient dung heaps and cemeteries
  pieced together like a quilt into canon -
and explain to me how the patterns you see
  on paper have moved you from poetry appreciation
   to witness for the prosecution.

Since when did you believe what a stranger
told you without checking their sources -
getting references, touching the holes in those
hands which dam the holes in their argument?

Tell me - tell me what it is that you know
  for certain
  beyond the shadow
  without a single, reasonable   solitary
         doubt?

Let me tell you.

These things I believe without certainty because I do
because belief has nothing to do with the facts and everything to do with perception and the making of meaning
from the patterns
on the pages of the Universe.

I believe that I am breathing and that I exist.

I believe that the trajectory of faith intersects
  the perplexity of confounding doubt
    at our points of pain and in those split seconds
  in which we have looked away from what matters.

I believe that God exists for every person
who cannot explain the inexplicable and does not
de-fine deity with a limited number
of sounds and images.

I believe that we do not find God in Church
or Mosque or Temple or Kiva.
I believe that God finds us wherever we are
and when we least expect it
often in the most compromising situations.

I believe that the criminals of scripture
  the murderers, adulterers, thieves and traitors
  the ones who broke every Commandment
  the ones who laughed in the face of their God
  and the ones who hid their faces from God
  these are some of God's most beloved.
And I believe that every one of them
  fictional and as real as my sister's laughter
  has been born and reborn and born again
  in the genetic and moral codes
  of human beings throughout time
   democrat and republican and libertarian and green
   "male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free"
   you - but most definitely - me.

I believe that there are spaces between everything
and that because of those spaces
nothing is unaffected by everything else in the Universe.
I believe that butterflies in the rainforest
  change weather patterns on other continents -
  that bombs tested in Nevada in the 1940's
  are still killing people -
  that the Integrity of Creation could be resurrected
  by human effort
  but it is more likely to be
  a post-human event.
I believe that gravity makes us strong or kills us -
  that plate tectonics are the source of our instability -
  that earthquakes can cause tsunamis -
  the ocean can reclaim territory taken from it
  in the first few words of Genesis -
  that we can be torn from each other at a moment's notice -
   so it is best to treasure one another
   while we have the chance.

I believe that without a "doubt" nothing would change
and that would be a tragedy
a consummation of that which is to be feared
not desired.

I believe that hope is necessary and dangerous -
that love is - but can't be explained
that charity is the beginning of self-improvement
that choice is evidence of free will
and it is the trail that our biographers will follow
to map the moral contours of our internal terrain.

I believe that we are made of the dust of stars
and the stuff of history
  and our particles have memories
   and our memories have power
    and that power is the D.N.A. of all
     possible futures.

I believe that artists and scientists and teachers and inventors
  of the highest caliber have found
  "where their passions meet the world's need"
  thereby rediscovering fire in places where
   we would never think to look -
   often under a rising Phoenix we haven't recognized.

I believe that dead dinosaurs are in short supply
and that water and wind and fire and plate tectonics
are seriously underrated   as replacements.
I believe that work can be good if it is meaningful
that the custodian and the C.E.O. both wear clothes
  both have idiosyncracies
   both rise and fall on their
    definitions of success
     and chance.

I believe that there is life after death
that we have yet to imagine the full implications of that
for all species
  and that those who can hear the voices of our ancestors
   should not only be healing the broken hearts
   of grieving mothers on television
    but filling the seats of congress
    and healing nations.

I believe that in the aftermath of Divine Intervention
     on behalf of the poor
      the leperous
      the gender challenged
      the shunned
     and the damned
  we have a limited amount of time -
  "one frail foolish flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity"
   to agree to the terms of our Covenant
   with God and with one another
    before the sun goes dark
    and our story is one of sorrow
        instead of redemption.

I believe that resentment must be cut from our bodies
  and replaced with unrelenting gratitude
  so that we can see that we are the ones
   called to see God in everything
   and to share that insight
    by the way that we breathe.

I believe that the "cost of freedom is buried in the ground" -
and that only by valuing life above all else
  will we make a lasting and just peace.
I believe that beauty is more meaningful than truth -
that truth is personal
  that "control is an illusion"
   and that, like Alice Through the Looking Glass
  the most direct route to enlightenment
        is to walk in the opposite
direction.

I believe that I love my husband deeply -
and sometimes passionately
and sometimes beyond reason
and that we don't get what we deserve
and that I just happen to be lucky in love
the third time around.

For this moment, this is my creed.

And I ask you to tell me yours.
Don't tell me what you know -
tell me what you believe -
tell me who you love -
tell me the story of your life.

Sing me the song that was sung by the angels at your birth
the ballad of your sufferings
  the arias of your ecstasies.
Show me your children
your answered prayers
  your most beautiful creations.
Let me touch the fabric of your integrity
the weave of your imagination
  the outline of your best efforts to save the world
   by saving one life
    in addition to your own.

Don't ask me to believe what only you have seen
don't shun me for my disbelief
don't pity me my differences
please?

find a way to celebrate what I have found to be true for me
celebrate my creed as I celebrate your creed
the discovery of what is true for you.

Let's point to the topography of our common ground
and agree to learn from each other's mistakes.
Let's hold onto each other when we are "rocked by diagnosis"
and let go of each other when the time is right.
Let's interpret together the language of God
whispered in the swaying Liquid Amber trees on a Spring evening
thundering onto the populated beaches of the Indian Ocean
singing in the seasonal migrations of millions
explaining the Mysteries of our Universe
  through dreams and cellular memories
   and the creeds of each generation
    of our kind.

Tell me your creed
as Thomas might have done
  in the language of your own heart
     in truth and in faith
       in your own time
         or God's.