My Easy God is Gone
I have lost my easy God – the one whose name
I knew since childhood.
I knew his temper, his sullen outrage,
his ritual forgiveness.
I knew the strength of his arm, the sound
of his insistent voice.
His beard bristling, his lips full and red
with moisture at the moustache,
His eyes clear and piercing, too blue
to understand all,
His face too unwrinkled to feel my
child’s pain.
He was a good God – so he told me -
a long suffering and manageable one.
I knelt at his feet and kissed them.
I felt the smooth countenance of his forgiveness.
I never told him how he frightened me,
How he followed me as a child,
When I played with friends or begged
for candy on Halloween.
He was a predictable God, I was the
unpredictable one.
He was unchanging, omnipotent, all-seeing,
I was volatile and helpless.
He taught me to thank him for the concern
which gave me no chance to breathe,
For the love which demanded only love in
return – and obedience.
He made pain sensible and patience possible
and the future foreseeable.
He, the mysterious, took all mystery away,
corroded my imagination,
Controlled the stars and would not let
them speak for themselves.
Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce
umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and
sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have
learned to love them.
And to know that they are the wounds that
make love real.
His face eludes me; his voice, with all
its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not
make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when
he held my hand.
I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns
piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again – I whose boyhood was
turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do
not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too – and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving
from our own reality.
Now the bread is warm in my mouth and
I am warm in its mouth as well.
Now my easy God is gone – he knew too
much to be real,
He talked too much to listen, he knew
my words before I spoke.
But I knew his answers as well – computerized
and turned to dogma.
His stamp was on my soul, his law locked
cross-like on my heart,
His imperatives tattooed on my breast, his
aloofness canonized in ritual.
Now he is gone – my easy, stuffy God – God,
the father – master, the mother – whiner, the
Dull, whoring God who offered love bought
by an infant’s fear.
Now the world is mine with all its pain and
warmth, with its every color and sound;
The setting sun is my priest with the ocean for it’s alter.
The rising sun redeems me with rolling
waves warmed in its arms.
A dog barks and I weep to be alive, a
cat studies me and my job is boundless.
I lie on the grass and boy-like, search the sky.
The clouds do not turn to angels, the winds
do not whisper of heaven or hell.
Perhaps I have no God – what does it matter?
I have beauty and joy and transcending loneliness,
I have the beginning of love – as beautiful as it
is feeble – as free as it is human.
I have the mountains that whisper secrets
held before men could speak,
I have the oceans that belches life on
the beach and caresses it in the sand,
I have a friend who smiles when he sees
me, who weeps when he hears my pain,
I have a future of wonder.
I have no past – the steps have disappeared
the wind has blown them away.
I stand in the Heavens and on earth, I
feel the breeze in my hair,
I can drink to the North Star and shout
on a bar stool,
I can feel the teeth of a hangover, the
joy of laziness,
The flush of my own rudeness, the surge of
my own ineptitude.
And I can know my own gentleness as well
my wonder, my nobility.
I sense the call of creation, I feel its
swelling in my hands.
I can lust and love, eat and drink, sleep
and rise,
But my easy God is gone – and in his stead
The mystery of loneliness and love!
© Copyright – James Kavanaugh
I too like this poem, though where the poet relishes in becoming free from God, I begin to see the majesty of God. While I certainly don’t agree, on the subject–for me there always will be a God– the poem does resonate with me in its discussion of relationship with God– how certainly it changes, not because Father in Heaven changes, but rather because we change, we grow up, and our world is not black and white as we once thought, but rather billions of fragmented shades of grey. Suddenly, its harder to say universally that something is right or something is wrong, even though those two polar opposites are always there. Perhaps I’m blasphemous for suggesting so, but over the years my relationship with my parents and my relationship with God have taken on parallel paths, which I see reflected inversely in this poem. The poet goes from being obedient out of fear (which is an acceptable form of obedience, but most likely not the most penitent) to abandoning listening to God’s voice, ignoring his counsel, and finding his “freedom”– supposed freedom from consequence, from judgment, the poem implies. I think every child obeys their parents out of fear at some point in their lives. And as children get older, you suddenly find yourself if choosing to be obedient, to be obedient, because it brings you blessings on your behalf. Not a bad way to live either, just challenging when you don’t see the blessing. Here’s where the analogy to parents falls through– anyone who’s lived with parents or had relationships with parents as an adult finds this last bit near impossible, so I suppose it applies only to God.
Lastly, which I’d say is the most difficult, is doing the required thing, the obedient thing, not out of fear, not for blessing, but to conform your will to the will of the Lords. Extremely difficult, but eternally rewarding– because you’re changing your character to become like unto your Father’s character. And line by line, precept by precept, here a little and there a little, you become more like Him, with a lot of hard work, a lot of repentance, and infinite heaps of His grace. But you do it, because its what we were sent here to do: “For Behold, this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”
Difficult, most certainly. Impossible, most certainly not. After all, He did say he was on our side, and always from the very beginning.