God

 

“God has no religion.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“I believe that what people call God is something in all of us.”
John Lennon

GodIllustration: Elena Caldera

How God has shrunk.
That glowing immensity from childhood –
How he’s now shrunk.

The naive certainty has evaporated.
His being your intimate eavesdropper –
His being bound up with your inner voice. It’s gone.

He’s long been withdrawing from nature herself.
Even astronauts, overwhelmed by the universe,
Are now prepared to credit little of it to him.

His long white beard has been shorn.
His mastery of the world is undermined.
His confident masculinity is redundant.

God2

He’s become shriveled to almost nothing
And yet a scientific paganism insists
That God is still in everything –

That he, she or it can be everywhere;
For the tiniest atoms have self-awareness
And God can be inside them, as a quantum presence.

The Unknowable; the Ineffable.
The Ancient of Days; the Omnipresent,
Has now shrunk down to particle-size.

Particles with divine properties:
There are particles that can go backwards in time;
Particles that can be in two places at once.

So, as the Hindi poet Kabir says,
“God is the breath inside the breath.”
A thought that allowed him to live to 120.

I look down at my body.
How did all these atoms come together,
To conspire with my attempt to be human?

And why do I still cry out “Oh God!”
When experiencing paroxysms of pain,
Or heightened bodily pleasure?

Is God a doctor? Can he grow new limbs?
Heal broken minds? Pour oil on troubled waters?
Is it God who dispenses serendipitous sensations of bliss?

Famously a teacher hovered over a child who was drawing
And asked the child what its drawing depicted. “God,” the child asserted.
The teacher remonstrated, “But no one knows what God looks like.”

“They’ll know now,’ the child replied with sublime assurance,
Oh God! lovers cry out when, with any luck, they climax symbiotically.
Does God come out of hiding for a mutual orgasm?

Is God lured into manifesting himself by sounds of human love?
At some point in their lives, everyone asks; ‘Who the fuck is he?’
A shape-shifting joker who laughs behind an unknowable hand.

 

Heathcote Williams

 


By Heathcote Williams

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One Response to God

    1. Why do you present him typically rather than mystically ?
      MG?
      JL , ahhhhh !
      Orgasm, 120…, in a lifetime , a woman has how many ? There is only 1 moon to Earth !
      I think he might appear for ‘mutual aid’ , certainly not a mini moment of orgasm.
      Astronauts dont know nothing ! (Ego … Dont know shit )
      Perhaps the poor children have GOD beaten out of them !

      God is visible i think, there are a few i think, at least 1 , its just people who do not believe he is there ! And a building with 4 walls and a roof does not make god !
      RDC – i think i am !

      Best thoughts , a+

      Comment by Angus Anderson on 19 June, 2015 at 7:58 pm

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