Gospel & Universe 🌎 Many Tribes
All Those Things the Wise Men Say
Working on a Mystery - Water Spirits - Parents
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Working on a Mystery
(for Tom Petty, R.I.P.)
The sages were so eager to be seen as wise men, not knowing that it’s a moment’s worth. They were so eager to be seen as folding the world into union, with sacred threads and poems from the abyss.
But when whatever it was was said and done, they returned to drops of water running down a dream into the great ocean, or drying in the sun.
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Water Spirits
Abraham — Islam may literally mean Submission, but they all require it, from the water in the beginning to the garden of obedience, from the floodplain of the drowned to the wafer and the wine; all the children of Abraham must in one way or another submit to moral rules and litigation, to love, repentance, mercy, and the Book, whatever the lineage, or whatever geographers, historians, common sense or Watson and Crick might say, there is only one God.
Moses — What does it matter what the old books say — gibberish cuneiform and painted idols and blasphemous epics (Gilgamesh with his bleeding heart trailing across the clay ravines of Mesopotamia) when the universe is one, and there is one God to rule them all?
Jesus — What does it matter what the Old Book says about laws and broken promises, as long as we suspend our reason and accept there are inferior laws of chemistry according to which chemicals, DNA, and nature makes us who we are, and there are superior laws of Chemistry according to which water turns into wine?
Muhammad — In the matter of smashing icons and cups of wine Islam has no peer, for not even Art dare frame that fearful Symmetry, or draw in sky the mouth that spoke that iconic iconoclastic text that told us about graven images, a black stone devoid of figures, and water but not wine.
Shiva — Drunk on love, his basalt leg is wrapped around the smooth stone torso of Parvati, while his tangled locks stream down from Kailash in the clouds, the OM on his forehead unravels and we become one with Ganga Ma and a million other deities until our minds are so numb with counting that we come back to One.
Buddha — His mind consumes the One and peoples Zero with a stream of consciousness that flows from where he is over distant oceans to where he is, always Now, no longer stuck in karma, caste, samsara, or time, but in eternal movement from this shore to the farthest shore, past holy books and continents, past Ice Ages, planets, the Milky Way, galaxies and universes until he becomes that point in distant space that disappears
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Camus — That pied-noir was like the Buddha, minus the meaning, a Heraclitus of Algiers whose being flowed like water between his fingers, like the charge of an electron from the opposite side of the world to your optic nerve and your finger tapping a key, and out you go again from this continent to the next in a split second.
Laozi — Or was it a collection of poets that wrote those obscure words about how water works by nourishing the roots and not pretending to Pinot Noir?
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Parents
God has to be a Father, for who else could hide their love so completely? Who else could be so stern, slap us on the back with encouragement, but not blubber, make a display of Himself, or tell us what He meant?
If God were a Mother, She would open her arms for all to see. She would enfold us with kisses, and hug us all the way home, but never pretend that She didn't exist and that we were on our own.
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