the point is Being

The point of religion
[yes, the reviled "r" word]
as always intended
being to live intensely
and richly, here and now,
a life overrun by significance,
daily lives integrating rapture
and insight stemming from
dreams into the human experience,
and strength overcoming
their terror of mortality.
Aspiring to live generously,
desiring to inhabit each part
      of their humanity,
living large-hearted
      and justly
are these faithful.
I pity the grasping
and mean-spirited.

Divorce

I've been married before
a state in which I chose to live
but not like Washington or Oregon
and I've been divorced
but that's a condition
not a state to my way of thinking
it's being dis-married
or un-stated
I am an un-married man

Those Whom...

Those with whom I've lived
those I've always loved most
     deeply and passionately

whom I wish I'd best understood
been present for
and been able to pour out myself
those for and from
whom I need forgiveness most
and carry forever forward
in heart engulfed 'mid confusion,
longing and regret;
perhaps, and only just so
it will ever be they
who move my heart
in many a name,
in many a guise,
in many a rapture
     of joy and of sorrow

Forgiveness

At once complex
     and fundamental
elusive yet necessary
it remains easy to say
     what it is not;
but being rendered insensible
by wrongs inevitable
visited on human life
leaves me hollow.
I count the capacity
      to forgive
a prerequisite to freedom.

Waxing Philosophic

A dreadful life, Philosophe!
Wary of imagination
and certain of nothing.
But I, certained of this,
that the minds' eye,
a sacred faculty,
prompts holiness
in heart's affections
and the truth of imagination
makes beauty as truth.

You Decide

Perhaps knowledge is tacit
and not consciously acquired
integrating vast observations
and data
into a focal awareness
subject to interpretative frameworks
rooted in an inextricable position
in ill-tempered hearts and minds,
the speed and complexity of integration
racing ahead
of the ponderous processes
of logic and inference,
or,
perhaps I'm full of shit.

A Rejection of Theology

Modern secular humanism
more lethal than religious bigotry
reveals an innate destructiveness
in man's inherently feral idolatry
set as absolute value
(by some called nation, or reason,
or religion)
that, compelling annihilation
of all rival claimants;
but to allow the ineffable Reality
an alteration of life,
seeing through the finite symbols
to the God beyond god
past theism and comprehending,
now, that is God;
that God appearing
after god has disappeared
in the anxiety of doubt.