A poem by Stan Raines

Here is the One Who Knows
Building many mansions
For those so soon to come.

Their own longing is the spring
That will bring them to Him,
The One Who Sets Their Table.

Troubled people they are
In His Absence so long,
Their fervent prayer is “Come for me.”

“Come for me.
I’ve waited very long.
I’ve hopes, I’ve prayed,
You’ll come for me.”

But He at his Business
Miters and plumbs waiting houses
At his Business, The One Who Knows.

This poem is a couple of years ago, and, like most of the poems I’ve presented here, was first presented at The Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts Center Writer’s Forum. It was received graciously, with a couple of cat calls about, “There you go again!” which, indeed, was true. I had gone again. There’s a strain in my poetry where, as I said to someone recently in a letter, my inner-Tevya is arguing with and about God. This is another one of those, although here I’m quibbling with some strains of believers, and sometimes myself.

I, myself, am totally inconsistent. One moment, as I said, my inner-Tevya takes over and I am in deep conversation with my God, as close and as personal a deity as ever was conceived. The next I’m very agnostic and very ambivalent on the same subject. Then there are the periods of angry rejection, although after much personal observation, I find that these moments are closely aligned with periods of self-rejection. Looney-tunes, anyone?

My favorite story of faith occurs in the opening chapters of The Life f Pi by Yann Martel, which I bought one day because it had such an interesting cover and, standing in the bookstore, I flipped to a chapter that began saying it would unfold a story that would make me believe in God. Oh, really, I mused. Good luck, my friend. The cover won me and I bought it.

It is the story of Pi, born in India, raised Hindu, but who had encountered a small Christian church on a vacation somewhere in the mountains. He was so fascinated by the deep thoughtfulness he heard eavesdropping on the priest there that he went in and begged the man to teach him this new religion. Later, he was in a bakery run by a Moslem at the prayer hour and was overwhelmed by the piety of the man, prayer rug on the dusty floor, head bowed to the earth. So Pi asks the man to be his Imam or teacher.

Then, coincidentally while walking on the promenade along the seaside with his family, he is greeted by all his teachers who praise him in turn for his devotion to their various religions, and then begin to hector him to choose the one true way, which, of course, each claimed was their own to the exclusion of the others.

Pi asks each in turn if they do not worship the one true God and each, of course, affirms it. He then argues that, obviously, all of their various deities must be the same and it’s up to them to figure out how to achieve harmony amongst themselves. He, for one, was satisfied.

when I am at my sanest, my feeling is something like that. I was a reader of Joseph Campbell for a while, who collected as many myths as he could in the hope that, as with the mythographers of the ancient world, we could discover the many harmonies that abound in the stories and thus unmask the deity, the spiritual force, the reality that speaks through them all.

Perhaps we shall. In the meantime, we write small pieces that may or may not be brickwork along the way.