What can an old man say to younger generations? Do they want to hear anything from an old poet writing in the desert where God and demons are faced? Can anything be said at all? This entry is based upon a poem I just wrote, “Intimations.”
Speaking from the twilight zone
where old age dances at last
in a crescendo of disappearance,
I have much of nothing to say
to those in earlier seasons
except a few intense intimations
from my still warm-blooded soul.
Even if I have only a few simple things to say, or if no one cares to listen to such a buffoonish guy, let’s see how it goes here.
Whoever you are, whatever you do,
do not distract away into disregard
and bury in shallow graves your
greatest longing, the liminal quest
to be found alive & loved by God.
My new book of poetry that is in the process of publication right now is entitled The Greatest Longing. What is that longing? What is your greatest longing, deepest yearning of all? Is it for something, anything, other than the Presence and Love of God? If it is, why?
Face your death mask now
in a full staring of mortality
and love without calculation
while the bird of dawn still rises.
Confess to yourself your own death now so to reduce any fear of it. Realize you will die and that you are not terminally unique and will avoid the experience of all us others. Love and death are our destinies that begin here and now. Love itself is a dying, a withering away of ego and the fears, anxieties, delusions, and distractions that come from it. God became death for us in Jesus Christ, the most crazy and beautiful story and event in infinity and beyond. Love is our passage through life and our crossing of the threshold of death. Faith in Christ is a sacred gift, a perpetual dawning in the wake of the Lord Jesus’ resurrection (which is also our resurrection).
No matter your daily work,
allow yourselves to be poets
of sense & spirited imagination
& mystics naked to the sacred.
Whether you work with AI, own a small business, are a physician or laborer, an accountant or astronaut, all of us are called to be Homo Poetica and Homo Mysticus, people who dare to contemplate being a human being and being human, who risk finding beauty in ugliness and pray with imagination to our imaginative God. Don’t flee from being poetic and mystical in mind and heart. It is part of our destiny to experience this life in all its catastrophes and bliss, to encounter the sacred in the ordinary and the sublime, here and now. Not some other time, some other place. The experiences of daily life are intimations from God of His Presence and the mad love, the bizarrely astounding love, He has for each of us.