God is a vagrant
Outside the skeptics’ court
Only present
When manacled
And without
Proper ID
Over looked
By EGOS and SUPER-EGOS
This poem offers an image of God quite different from a traditional “God the Father” who oversees His creation as a judge perched up on a bench, the highest point in a courtroom. This vision of God accents the myopia of humans. Like adjudicators are apt to say: the courtroom doesn’t care what the truth is, only what can be proved within it. Amidst our all-too-common attempts to harness the power of God for our own devices, God is like a homeless person who is palpably in our midst but mysteriously invisible. Whether the legalist or extreme skeptic (sometimes the same person), God escapes our view because we are looking for love in all the wrong places — or doubt that love exists at all — both taking too narrow of a view. I suspect that God has little compunction to shatter the skeptic’s cramped formulas or pose for the legalist’s paint-by-number portraits. Who would want to worship such a manacled God? More likely God feels free to roam such infinitely vast creation, where the E on the eye chart is SO BIG that we can’t see it. Maybe God rocks out on a scale like the Planck scale which entails tiny distances and huge energies. Whatever the veil that underlies our myopia, the courtroom is a poor venue to plumb God’s depths and heights. And without even a bad driver’s license photo, God is reduced to a vagrant, outside the usefulness of society’s proprietors. Our well-developed egos and superegos ignore inconvenient truths, settling for some lesser truth, so we can manage our own affairs. This can seem much easier, settling for the burden of proof, rather than trading up to the burden of truth. But, alas, pondering such things may lead to following in your Father’s footsteps, as apparent vagrancy.
