peace & love on planet earth

The truth is I believe in a God that died just as we die—alone, bereft, once and for all—and I believe in a God that broke free from that static tragedy and thereby transformed forever what we understand death to be and what we understand life to be. I believe we do in fact each create the God we serve, and I believe that underlying all of those creations is a singular being that is available and indivisible and constant for all of us. I believe that you and I have come to Christianity simply because it was the religion in which we were raised, and I believe that we are Christians because it is our fate. (How I love Paul Ricoeur's definition of faith: chance raised to the level of a destiny by virtue of a constant choice.) I believe there is no one truth, and yet we must wager everything on the one that claims us.

I wouldn't even be a religious person were it not for poetry, which has not only repeatedly brought me into contact with an other, but has seemed to demand something of me in its wake—very like Teresa's visions. But poetry remains perpetually open. God moves through art but doesn't get stuck there. I sometimes think he gets stuck in theology—fixed, frozen, and therefore inevitably falsified.

“I should be distressed that I drop off to sleep during my prayers and during my thanksgiving after Holy Communion. But I don’t feel at all distressed. I know that children are just as dear to their parents whether they are asleep or awake and I know that doctors put their patients to sleep before they operate. So I just think that God ‘knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.'”