God

I discovered God a few years ago as a poetic device -- my invocation of God in poetry has since deepened my "relationship with God." I'm a nonbeliever, so to speak, but I came to see that I'm only a nonbeliever in specific senses. For example, Sam Harris, a different kind of nonbeliever, loves to say we're all atheists with regard to Zeus. So I'm basically a nonbeliever also in the general sense of any monotheistic God, or any notion of a plurality of gods, and so on and so forth. But it's brilliant to read someone saying we can continue to use this powerful symbol in new ways. Kauffman is on to something. God is so potent. When I was a kid I'd sit on the floor of my room and look out at the sunshine and ask God for some kind of support. I didn't know what I was asking for, or who I was asking. I just had to ask something -- I knew something wasn't right, so I prayed. I've since developed the language and the awareness to recognize the source of some of these earlier struggles. I can recognize, in retrospect, needs that weren't being met, feelings of isolation and shame, love, fear, conflict. I can see my younger self reaching out and speaking to "God" because -- who else was there?

Now when I speak to God in a poem it is much more deeply rooted in awareness -- of self, of my needs, of others. For example, I ask, "Have you noticed, God / that lately I objectify you? [...] Have / you noticed the way / I beat myself up over not / knowing myself as I know you?" I am grateful that I spoke to God at all during my childhood, because I remember how fragile and unclear that experience was. I doubt it feels like this for "believers" -- for example, I sense that believers I know have a relationship with God that is much more coherent than mine was.  But what I can see is what it was like for me to speak to God back then, and what it was like to be an angry adolescent, denying God as an absurdity, and now, to see myself invoking God earnestly, to manage to allow God to stand in for myself, for people in my life, for the nature of things, for questioning itself, and, beyond all that, for God. One of my friends read a poem of mine recently and tried to express how surprised he was that a nonbeliever (his word!) would speak of and to God so earnestly, without being ironic or trying to argue with, say, the Christian notion of God. Well, I admit there is a small sense of challenge in my poetry -- as I imagine it may be challenging for some people to hear me speaking to God as a lover, or as a friend, or as myself. For other people I imagine it may also be exciting, or familiar, or refreshing. (Hopefully for some it would be both challenging and exciting!) Either way, the reasons for nonbelievers to speak of and to God are many, and though I don't take it as reclaiming, or claiming, God -- I take it rather as opening up to God, which is maybe an odd was for a so-called nonbeliever to speak of it -- I do take it that believers and nonbelievers share much more than some often think. The split between us is an illusion; why not allow ourselves to unite in God?

some say heaven, but it's not heaven exactly.

that's eternity; up here everything just blows away.

and where are all the souls? are they

hiding? do they go haunting on stormy

afternoons, screeching down from heaven? well, it's not

heaven exactly. it makes one wonder

what God does with all those souls—

God, You Poet.

i wish i'd dream Your eyes, God,

just once more, so they could haunt

me awhile longer.

i'll never see a heaven that lasts,

but i'm holding on... just awhile longer.

it's Your eyes, God— they saw me once.