Let My People Think

Posts tagged ‘love’

Image of God (a poem)

Image of God A couple of weeks ago, as we were driving somewhere, my son asked me to turn on the song “Zombie” by Cranberries. As we listened to the song, I suddenly was overwhelmed with a sense of profound connection with the entire humanity. I felt connected to all the 7+ billion of people on this planet. I felt completely one with that huge, multifarious organism called “humankind”. That took me by complete surprise.

I don’t think that I have never experienced that sense of unity with humanity before. It was very meaningful to me. A day or two later, I wrote this poem.

The poem’s uneven and somewhat jagged construction and varying rhyming schemes are meant to be expressive of the sense of beauty and diversity which exists in this world. Some stanzas and even some lines overlap and dovetail with one another, and this is done on purpose. This is illustrative of how different persons and people groups dovetail with one another to form one symbiotic organism. The poem’s cadence builds its pace to a crescendo to highlight a sense of urgency before the final stanza.

Enjoy!

IMAGE OF GOD

Religion with its plastic smile
Numbs our mind, and rapes our soul,
And leaves a gaping, bleeding hole
Where our heart once used to be.

It builds big buildings. It produces
A stream of talks and printed pages.
It worships books with guilded edges
Which can’t legitimize its crimes.

It lets us keep our greed, our judgments,
To Western sins it dulls our mind
Shuts off compassion, leaves us blind
To human suffering next door,
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Poetry

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Inedible Heart (a poem)

I used to read a lot of French classics growing up (Maupassant, Stendhal, Flaubert, etc.) They talk about a certain way of life, extolling a certain subset of humanistic values. While I appreciate their cultural significance – not all of those works line up with the ethics that I personally aspire to.

Modern Hollywood productions with a romantic storyline largely follow the same suit. The problem is that they usually tell you only the first part of the story. Nearly all of their stories end with budding romance. There isn’t a high demand for movies which would teach you how to sustain the fire of love for decades, through the highs and lows of life. Movies like “Bicentennial Man” are more of an exception rather than the rule. Script writers are reluctant to tell you what happens later down the road, when you live from one conquest to the next one, from cradle to the grave. And this is what this poem is about.
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Poetry

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For God so loved the world (a poem)

For God so loved the worldThe kind of love which stands above division, judgment, and offense is usually fairly difficult to cultivate and practice. When it becomes our heart culture, however, it has a very real potential to open people up to what we have to say. Then we can usher those we thus love into the very presence of Jesus, so that he can do through us for them what no educational or correctional institution can. But we can get to that point only when we begin with unconditional love and acceptance on the most fundamental human level, before anything else can be offered.

Am I there? Not quite yet, but I know that I am on my way there. I also experientially know that place of judgmentalism and misplaced pride which is the polar opposite of agape-love. That’s a place to which I have absolutely no intention of ever regressing to.

We love playing it safe and talking in generalities. But what if we allow ourselves to get more specific with more general statements such as “God so loved the world”? What would that look like? The poem below attempts to unpack that Scriptural verse within the context of years 2016-2017.
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Just Thinking, Poetry

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A brief history of human institutions

Cain and Abel

Orphan mentality

Not allowing ourselves to experience genuine unconditional love of God produces insecure, envious, jealous orphans. Insecure people act out of their orphan spirit, drive by a constant inner dialogue of constant comparison and competition. They project their insecurities outward, and use performance-based acceptance or rejection as two complementary tools of manipulation and control, to achieve desired behavior conditioning from people around them.

Control and Oppression

Once a measure of control is achieved, people who made it to the top strive to build systems that would codify their fictional superiority, thus cementing the injustices, unfairness, and inequality. This gave rise to monarchies, slaveries, cast systems, and various flavors of religious hierarchies. The tools of social conditioning that proved to be very useful, time and again, are shame, guilt, rejection, fear, punishment, and pain. These tools become integrated into various social, cultural, and religious expressions, and with a passage of time they got to be perceived as “normal”.
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History

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A yin-yang God

yin and yangUnfortunately, a commonly accepted understanding of God in Christendom is tainted by an Augustinian depiction of God as sort of a divine yin-yang, God being partly light, and is partly darkness. Well there’s a problem with that view, since:

1 John 1:5
5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.

Most people that hold to yin-yang understanding of God’s character don’t explicitly acknowledge it as such. Instead, in essence what they say is this: that God is light, and yet he can do evil things, and when he does, they are not evil but good, since God does them with a greater good in mind. So then, God can inflict pain, harm, or disability on someone for greater good, which is usually presented as some form of “drawing one closer to him”.

There are physically handicapped people who are known in Christian circles who have attributed their disability to a direct, willful act of God, along with any positive changes in their character that followed. That’s a very misinformed outlook, and a dangerous one at that.

There are numerous problems with this view.

First, if you try to inflict pain, harm, or disability on someone, they will never want get close to you. Instead, they will run away from you as fast and as far as they can, or they will fight back with all the strength they got. Try it on a pet rat and see how far you get. Please don’t try it on humans, it’s been done, and it never worked.

Second, if that’s your view of God, and you simultaneously believe that God is love, you’ve just completely redefined what love is.
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General Questions, Just Thinking

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