MEMOS

Given by James Covington on December 26th, 2004

Some years ago poet John Berryman wrote “Five Addresses to the Lord.” Since then a number of books on God have been published for a popular audience, biographies(unauthorized) and autobiographies and conversations with God among them. In fact in a recent publication, Time Magazine’s cover feature had to do with The God Gene. Some of the books in my library that I have particularly enjoyed are The Biology of God by the zoologist, Alister Hardy; Working on God, Why God Won’t Go Away, Bringing God Home, and Francis Crick’s book, “The Great Hypothesis.”

So as we wind down another year and prepare for 2005, I thought I would take the occasion to share a few memos to god with you today. God is known by many names and some of the more liberal theologians among us, have named God in different ways—“The Great Mystery of Life” and Paul Tillich’s phrase, “The Ground of Being,” are but two examples of how theologians have tried to bring greater depth and meaning to what we mean by “God” to help us think of God beyond the traditional anthropomorphic images.

So, today I thought I would get in on the act a little bit and share with you a few memos I have written recently to “The Great Unknown,” the “Source of All Being.” God is, after all, a central religious figure for believers and non-believers and all of us in between. Hence, an exercise in theological imagination, To Whom It May Concern: a mystical religious humanist’s conversation with god at year’s end, five brief memos to whom it may concern from one not sure of the address.

MEMO TO: “MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM”(Rudolph Otto’s definition of God).
FROM: a small-time mystic

O Mysterium Tremendum, as some have called you,
I am a rational man. I do not always enjoy dwelling in mystery.
It can be cold and lonely in the black holes of space’
And the shadowy recesses of my soul.
I do not know much about you, I confess.
I only know you are no miracle worker,
Beyond the daily miracles that pass as commonplace among us.
I only know you are no universal runner of errands,
Lest your creatures become lax in their spiritual exercises.
You are no cosmic accessory, a jewel in the crown of piety,
For the cosmos is quite lovely enough without thought of you.

You do serve to remind me, however, that much that I was,
That I am or will become, much that I experience
Cannot be ultimately reduced to the lowest common
Denominator,
Be it psychological, historical, political or sociological:
Philosophers call that reductionism.
What I experience of the mystery that you are and I am
Must never be belittled.
I reject the “nothing-butness,” attitude around me.
I sing praises that I am.
O mysterious one, or ones, power or powers,
I cannot become one of your great mystics,
Wrapped in continual meditation on the impenetrability of your mystery.
I am one who must reflect on all I experience—the happy and the horrible.

I demand some tasteful sense out of the menu in your cosmic cafeteria.
Nor will I accept at face values what others experience as grandeur,
Without testing it by my own encounters with this world we share.
I will not be led down the primrose path
By those who claim magical visions and supernatural powers.
No, I will remain one of your faithful doubters,
One of your loyal skeptics, thank you—
Only let us respect one another.
Still, you shake my skepticism, you challenge my doubt,
Mysterious One.
I have a sense of your primal power, and stand rapt in awe.
I admit it.
As iron filings are ordered by a simple magnet,
This universe is ordered beyond my poor comprehension.
I do not admit a master builder, an archetypal architect
With grand design; I am a reader of science;
Big bangs, steady states, are part of my lexicon.
I do not know if creation began at all, or always was, or will be.
I am not even sure the ultimate computer,
(To which, be honor, glory and praise)
Will unravel the mysterium of your tremendum.
May I share something with you, in secret, just between us?
There was a day not long ago when you, or something,
Shook my deepest doubt.
I heard a great crescendo voice in the sky
And wondered if the world were coming to an abrupt end
As some false prophets have suggested.
They sky was black with birds, or perhaps just gray with geese.
They filled the sky with their precise patterns
And settle on nearby trees and a lake to rest and restore
Before they winged their way southward.

I confess my heart leaped within me,
And, were there not skeptical friends who know me a skeptic to be,
I might have fallen on my knees in praise.
Please keep my confidence, O Mysterium Tremendum,
Lest my friends think I have converted to piety.
They declared you dead, oh, two decades or so ago,
Or was it a century? Now the death of God is a dead issue.
Results of your demise have been greatly exaggerated,
As they say.
Still, I do not know that you are alive—
But clearly you are not dead—the awe-ful mystery yet lives.
I only seek to be comfortable with it all,
To have rapport with you, O Mysterium Tremendum.
Some time ago when I asked a youth to draw me a picture of you,
He wrote a formula on the blank page, E=MC2,
A strange thing, I thought,
Typical of the sterile science they are teaching now.
Yet the more I thought, the more I though one could do worse
Than to put on a blank page, the equation
That says so much about you, so succinctly.
Why do you put wisdom in minds so young?

MEMO TO: UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS
FROM: A Wispy Bit of Consciousness

O Universal Consciousness, Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmic mind,
I address you. I confess I cannot conceive of you.
Surely the great Alfred North flipped his philosophical lid
With the thought there exists an ultimate brain,
God’s mind the cosmos we know.
I cannot conceive of you.
Yet there is a power, I admit, that makes for consciousness,
At least my own,
And by inference there exists a consciousness in others, too.
Some there are who think of you as the Great Personality,
But cannot find the faith to say that.
I admit my theology seems inconsistent here,
To posit a grand impersonal power
That can create consciousness that is not conscious of itself.
Unable to link the two, I call that paradox, and am off the hook.
Yet, try as I might, I do not find you personal.
I do not speak to you in words my neighbor would comprehend,
Save in the artifice of this minuscule memo.
I cannot find the cosmic mind greater in scope than my own.
Dare I say it? Yet I have a brain of 10 billion cells or so,
Each connected to 25,000 others, give or take.
One billion impulses circuit my brain every second
In my own booming, buzzing confusion.
Can you do better than that?
Is your universal brain more to be wondered at than my own?
I wish you were real to me, O universal Consciousness,
For I fight a gnawing cosmic loneliness.
I long for the celestial ear to hear me cry or laugh,
A Someone Other to listen to my confession,
When I have muddled when I should have marched,
To share a small surge of pride
When I have been virtuous and no one noticed,
Someone to nourish me when I have been courageous and lost,
My bloody wounds mocking my honor.
Alas, though I would cry out to you in words poetic or profane,
I believe my words fall into empty8 spaces where no one is.

It seems I am condemned to be conscious
In an unconscious cosmos
That I am destined to follow reason’s lead
That makes me reject church or common creed
That would make you real to me—as friend to friend.
If you are, if you hear, I trust these honest words will not offend.

MEMO TO : BENIGN INDIFFERENCE OF THE UNIVERSE
FROM: One Who Cares

O Benign Indifference of the Universe,
Hear me when I cry out to you!
But, in truth, how can you, if what I say is true?
If so, these words will revolve ‘round indifferent spheres
Spinning on their trajectory to no human or divine ears.
Still, though I doubt you care, hear me out, majestic
Indifference.

Clearly you are not our old theological hero, God,
Who rides down on a snow-white horse to rescue us in need.
No Don Quixote you, who stand by, or sit there
Twiddling your planetary thumbs
While nature drowns and plunges whole villages,
While wicked ones plot to pulverize the planet
With wars between themselves or against our mother earth.
The Holy Wars, the Crusades, the Holocaust, Vietnam , and
Now the madness of evil and corruption and war in Iraq.
Even our contemporary battles seem not to interest you.
Or why would not you act to save us from ourselves?
Your great indifference has its merits, though.
You are no celestial Peeping Tom,
Nothing every last sparrow that to earth does fall,
Recording in your great book of deeds
How far we have fallen from what we ought to do and be.
Personally, I would be scared to death
If ever I thought you cared and knew all I have done.
I’m not sure I could live with the guilt your noticing would prompt in me.

Those about me claim God’s will as their own—
A frightening though, that you are so schizophrenic!
Why, if this be so, if this one and that one are privy to your will,
You ought to have your will examined.
It’s a good thing there are those of us who don’t claim to know it,
Who can help to stop the wars those who do, wage.
But who would do it? Should we?
It is good to have doubters who are reconcilers
Between those who do battle because they know they are right
And are ready to fight to the last drop of blood to prove it.
No, I prefer to think you have no will for us below,
That we are here to muddle along with our best light
As to what is wrong and what is right,
What we ought and what we ought not to do.
It would make the world a safer place to be
If all agreed the human will is free.
But lest you think of m unkindly
For denying to you the capacity to care,
You will remember that I addresse4d you, O Benign Indifference!
You see, I think it is a good thing
That the rain falls on the just and on the unjust,
That effect follows cause, as the day the night,
That what is good, benign, ought to have a human face.
Still, when I examine what you have made,
I find that, on the whole, you did good work.
The earth’s a proper place to be, and I lead earth’s cheerleaders
In praising you, oh so Benign Indifference.

MEMO TO: THAT GREAT METAPHOR, GOD
FROM: A minor Metaphorical Creature

O Thou Great Metaphor of Being,
I have become convinced after three score years
That the poets know more than the theologians.
You see, theologians are scientists of the spirit.
They probe this experience, that thought, the other reality,
In volumes vast and sometimes systematic.
The sheer weight of all they pen, it seems,
Would throw the earth from its orbit.
The poets, meanwhile, have greater care for the balance of it all.
Succinctness, brevity, the well-chosen words they enthrall.
They do not skirt around the religious when they live it,
With words eschatological, ultimate, anthropological,
Supernatural and logical.
Theologians write such words as “Experiential Transcendence,”
While poets pen: “To Whom It May Concern.”
The poets come right to the point.
They drive deep within the experience, religious in label or not,
They slice out dross and leave the gem sparkling there in the air
For us to view from this side or from that,
Or lay it on the table of the spirit with reverent mien.
What theologians objectively analyze,
Poets subjectively penetrate.
Theologians take the sublime and try to make it simple—and fail.
Poets take the simple and make it sublime—with rhyme.

O Great Metaphor, forgive my being so hard on theologians.
After all, sometimes I fancy myself belonging to their clan,
Trying with mental gymnastics the cosmos to scan
And render it sensible to my churchly band.
It just seems at times they obfuscate the unobfuscatable;
They reduce the ineffable to the effable;
They confuse what should be unconfusable.

As for me, I see creation not as some tortuous tome, but a
Universal sonnet of which the human adventure is but a line.
Perhaps a sonnet is too modest for so huge a subject.
Perhaps an epic poem is more in keeping
With a theme so sweeping.
It really matters not so very much at all,
As long as we keep in mind,
We, a single line in one stanza of one short canto,
That the meaning of the thing is greater than simply our own line,
Important as that line is.
While the stanza will fail for want of a good line,
The whole epic will not fall apart if we do not rhyme
With what has gone before.
Still, the crafting of that line, the meter, the strength of words,
The sound, to view the poem with pride, must be profound.
Strange, I have spent time writing this pretentious memo to you,
And not even believing that you are a you. You are, after all,
No celestial publisher with rejection slip in hand,
Nor even with a letter inviting submission of my poem.
It is hard writing for one I do not believe reads poetry.
Yet, how else do I get beyond my own prosaic posture
To my existence which is shot through with poetry?
I am sorry if I personify you to make a point,
As I am doing in this soliloquy,
For to personify you is to limit you,
And that is not what I had in mind.
Well, what does it matter?
After all, you are only a great metaphor, aren’t you?

MEMO TO: COSMIC CREATIVITY
FROM: A co-creator

O thou Cosmic Creativity, forgive this presumptuous note.
I know you have other universes to fry; history to take and make
Into something worth our living in.
Still, I must remind you that you have not been doing very well.
One wit, who emerged from you very own energized self, said
“On the basis of past performance the future cannot safely be left to God.”
What did he mean? Well, If I must explain the obvious, I must.
We just can’t trust you any more.
Here we are, a faithful humanity, willing to believe
In the God of history:
God would work out God’s will, bring in the divine kingdom.
Well, things aren’t going all that well down here.
I should think you would be upset,
Quite willing to take on some-sub-contractors at the very least,.
It just doesn’t look good on your record, even if you don’t need
Letters of recommendation for the job you do.
It just doesn’t look good.

May I offer one suggestion? You won’t think it rude or crude?
I suggest we bring in some more laborers for the job!
People intensive—that’s the way to make history!
That’s right, we can’t expect you to do it alone.
Now don’t be offended, please, I know we can’t do it on our own;
We need the cosmic energy you provide so well;
The building blocks clearly we cannot make from scratch.
We still need those, and the, could you help us with a bit of
Urgency, human urgency? You don’t deal with human urgency”
Well, then, forget it; we’ll work on that ourselves.

But do keep the stars in the sky.
It gives us something to take our bearings by,
Something we can count on when there’s not much more.
And do keep the planets whirling in their orbs
We need to feel the steady keel beneath our feet.
And do keep the atom full of wonder.
Our scientists would be bored without such work to do;
Besides, it reminds us micro-cosm stands next to macro-cosm,
With history in between—that’s a nice balance.
And do keep the genes coming—we want to preserve something
Of our humanity, despite everything;
We want the human running race to continue.
And do keep the holy balance of creation—
We need to learn what we can and can’t do in the order of things.

And keep love as cement for your fractured humanity,
And if you can’t keep the love for us,
Let us learn to love.
Continue the process by which love begets love,
By which love transcends all tragedy,
By which love fuels hope in cosmic darkness.

O Cosmic Creativity, I beseech you now,
Join us in a great cosmic conspiracy toward the new creation.

Five memos to whom it may concern.

I hope they were read. Amen.