Letters to The - #3

We don’t need to discuss the inauthenticity of labels at length with each other. We know that earthly institutions fall short of what you wanted to create. I found a word in Wikipedia a long time ago, “panentheist”, that came so close. I tried it out with a few strangers. It worked well enough, but “ists” and “isms” leave so much to be desired, and even more undiscovered. I felt defined, and that wasn’t acceptable because definitions leave little room for mistakes, uncertainty, and growth, so I mostly leave it on the shelf. It’s the kind of word one only breaks out in a particularly sophomoric sort of mood.

If someone asked what kind of believer I am, I would simply tell them “I believe.” I wouldn’t mean in the Bible literally, or in Christian creeds and missions. I would just mean that I believe in The Truth, that exists; in The Light, that it shines; and in The Way, that there is one.

I believe in The.

What does it mean to believe in The? Perhaps it means that I accept the heavy reality of my own existence, and in doing so, I also accept yours.

Letters to The - #2

They say you are Peace, but you always are, and peace isn't always, at least not with me. Nobody knows peace until they first lose it and then find it again. Before, it's like air. It's nothing, until you need it.

The first peace I found was in someone’s arms. She loved me in my agony, and that was the first time I felt what peace feels like. It was only feelable because of the contrast. I hurt, and she made it better. For a long time I didn’t know how to feel peace without the contrast. Peace turned out to be an acquired taste, and for a long time any hint of its presence upset me, like day without night would be upsetting to any diurnal creature. Her arms were warm, often bare, and something about the outside of someone touching the outside of me felt complete. I’ve been throwing myself at touch ever since.

I try to touch you, too, to further the completeness. You are much harder, and flimsier, though. Bubbles burst at a harsh breath, but you won’t even let me feel fire, or lighting, or the bottom of the sea. Why do you keep the most magnificent parts to yourself? This hurts me. My soul keeps whining, “I want to know. I want to see. I want to feel.” I want all of it, even the parts that would kill me.

Trees are often an acceptable in-between. They last a while, they are both scratchy and warm, and they don’t need me, as you don’t need me. Trees, though, why do they get to sink so deeply into the earth? I’ve always found this to be truly unfair. I want to know the soil, to be buried up to my neck in the blanket of the world. You didn’t plant me, and you didn’t give me wings. You just gave me imagination barely sufficient enough to think of wanting to fly or grow roots. This hovering on the limbo of mantle and atmosphere nags at me. I am not yet settled in myself, and feet are at best a desolate kind of beauty.

Letters to The - #1

I’ve been praying to you for longer than I’ve been writing letters, but in truth, letters are more reassuring. Unlike prayers, which gush chaotically, which explode off my heart, across my tongue, and vanish just beyond hearing, letters remain. I can construct them, organize myself into neat, soldierly lines, and march up to you, terrified but resolute, words in hand regardless of my trembling voice.

I’m not writing to you out of anything more than sheer and utter perplexity, as well as a remnant of faith that is tattered, multi-cultural, semi-religious, vaguely scientific, and deeply reverent. Whether you are a great Master and Commander of a ship called the Universe, or the Universe itself, a garment-body of one limb of spiritual reality, I respect you, as only an ant can respect the Pacific Ocean. Whatever you are, wherever you begin and end, you are Something, and possibly Everything. Therefore, I feel the need to stay in touch, touch base, and send my regards.

If I may be so bold as to identify the Unidentifiable, I should tell you that I don’t think of you as a He, except during church on Sundays, where frankly it’s just unavoidable. Nor a She, nor an It. If anything you are a The. You are, have always been, not “a” god, not “a” lord, not “a” creator. You are “The”. You are the The. The Alpha and Omega, The Lord, The God of Creation, and so on. Why gender had to confuse this magnificent rendering of your non-personage, I can’t imagine, but early humans perhaps were too busy tangling with lions and uncatalogued species of poisonous plants to linger over the appropriateness of your pronouns.

However, as a twenty-first century construct, I am not so terribly occupied. I walk down the sidewalk on my lunch break, and when it glimmers a little underfoot, I think “ah, there is God, in the light.” I know that sidewalks sparkle because mica is added to the concrete, but to my Judeo-Buddhist-Protestant-Euro-American-Mystic mind, I see you in reflections, in surface traction, in explainable phenomena more than in the unexplained. I think that as scientists burrow deeper and deeper into reality, they are finding you, and calling your bits and pieces sound waves and photons, quarks and dark matter. Older explorers and diviners called other parts of you Flying Squirrel, Rhododendron, and Connemara. One of your fingernails might be Pluto. When I see the sun, it’s the Divine Neuron that conceived me, and all my earth-siblings. I think we are microbes in your terrarium, and even all the wires criss-crossing our world so that we can tweet angrily in California at news anchors in Manchester, are just strange new products of Us and You combined.

Us and You is another problem to me. Where do I end and you begin? I am within you, a dream in your waking, a part of your wheeling cosmos, just as the molecule in my stomach lining participated fully in the first dance at my wedding.

Where do I give up myself and look outside myself to find you? Am I not already found by being a part of you? I can sit very still sometimes and feel the tension of this connection. I can strum it like a golden thread in my mind that makes a beautiful albeit terrifying tone, and at times I cling to it as my lifeline, and at times I admire it, like an artist of found art objects, and I feel that I created our connection as much as it and You created me.

God, I dance within you. Abel brought you fruits, but really he brought you himself. His thorn-scratched fingers, his calloused palms and dusty feet and aching back. I bring myself everywhere I go, and I wanted to tell you that this is my most costly gift of worship. I am where I am, and I cannot see or know all of you, although I desperately want to. The dance floor you’ve given me in yourself--it is too big! The parts I’ll never see, I miss them already.

This is all I can manage for now--my own mythos of you, the one where you are simply You, and I am I, the same as if none of this had ever existed, no Exodus, no Popes, no BC or AD interpretations of the sacred, no sects or sermons. Not even the historical confusion of a man named Jesus. Just you and I wheeling together would still exist without all that, and this is how I found my way back to you--the long way round with sidelong glances at more Tao and Zen and pop psychology than anyone should suffer. There is more of your truth in my palms when they are empty.