Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Pathway to the Divine

Every now and then, a faint glimmer of god's hand reflects in that built by man,
When sunlight grazes a cathedral's spires revealing all their intricacies,
Or some such fleeting manifestation of godly beauty, that we,
Being imperfect, thinking lofty thoughts, imagine ourselves more.

But in all things not made by man, the cosmos, physical and natural world,
Does god's work beam forth with such blinding radiance, beauty and complexity,
As to shame the greatest, most daunting heights of human ambition,
With something as simple as a mountain stream.

With brutal indignity and self-delusion hath man pried himself from god's embrace,
To build up fortresses for our indifference and keep the sacred from our space,
The soil crushed and entombed beneath our streets, the water channeled underground,
The skies torn asunder by combusting jets and seas afloat with a discarded anthropogenic scum.

But god is not defeated, not yet at least, alive and well in forests flowing among the trees,
In soils richly teeming it leaches life from rock, in oceans swimming ever against human onslaught,
In clear nights, dancing lights along the milky-way,
In windswept mountain meadows whispering to us of play,

With infinite love and patience the gift of freedom god bestows.
Shall we come to live in heaven or hell? Our generation may never know,
God is of all things, our universe, our creator,
She is all of this, nothing less and nothing greater.

I pray we find amidst her many gifts, a state of peace and grace,
Though I rest my head in the knowledge that, regardless, we all return to her embrace.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Beautiful and inspiring. Glad you had a long weekend in the soil ! Thank you for sharing !

Kenny and Maggie said...

Overwhelming! We are at a loss to avoid superlatives, viz: If you had been writing in the 1820s, your "Pathway to the Divine"would have doubtless supplanted Wm. Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" as the had-to-know-for-the-test i.d. for the pantheistic/romantic Flowering of New England...but on looking it up, you clearly put him to shame!
And you apparently tossed it off during a weekend of Herculean tree felling/garden heaping.

We knew you had the muse well at hand from your earlier evocative blog on maple sweetness, but are overcome by the universal sweep of this one - especially the section celebrating the triumph of the divine, from the playful whispers of mountain meadows to the dancing lights of the Milky Way. Though you later respectfully bow to the Pachamama feminine, you followed Darby's youthful prescience (that god should remain beyond the personal) with "...in soils richly teeming it leaches life from rock..."

So many memorable lines....Do you mind if we share it beyond the river?

Keep it up, and love to all.

Jasper Boychuk said...

I am glad you guys apprciated it, it was born from the shock of being thrust from a weekend spent in solitary contemplation of the marvels of our backyard forest ecosystem back into the downtown core when I returned to work. It does make me think of times with Darb, I should forward him a copy. Feel free to do with it what you will, I use the blog as my published copy, so I may sneak changes in from time to time.

Miss you guys!

Much love.