steeples in the shape of knives
to god:
age 5. strawberry dress, springtime shoes, thorny nylons,
i asked why i had to dress for religion like dad does at work
to watch adults in robes dunk a baby’s head with water in the name of you and your son.
“respect,” came a multiple choice answer
to the short-answer question
that i had to peruse the bible to find myself:
your disciples dressed themselves in humility
and not in ties or mary janes. sculpting themselves after you,
humble lord. because, you know, you were always placing yourself
beneath others, for you so loved the world (john) that you
deluged it (genesis), and you are always with us (matthew)
except when your people created idols in your
absence (ezekiel, etc.), only now you say
they should be are condemned by a hunk of stone saying
thou shalt not have gods before you (exodus). but,
our lord supreme,
who says (375 million Buddhists)
that you (794 million believers in indigenous religions)
are the only (1.15 billion Hindus)
deity (1.1 billion nonreligious people)
in the unbounded sky? (1 million pagans)
i don’t want to believe in deism nor atheism, lord, but neither
do i want to believe that we crucified you inside a monotheistic bubble,
or that you are a professor without a lesson taught,
leaving your students to pursue their own answers for two millennium. we are
pharaohs drowning
in our own red sea of bullet wounds, and a cesspool of unaffordable hospital bills
that has not yet to part
(although so often I believe you have)
because,
our father who art in heaven,
hollow be thy name. you are a shepherd (psalms)
leading angry lambs with empty bleats
calling you the almighty. they are crusaders
of the ignorance inquisition, wielding your gospel
as steeples in the shape of knives
held to the unknowing throats of men in turbans and youth
sporting rainbow flags and homeless girls who
will bear a baby fated to grow up on a diet of food stamps and
silence.
is what i felt, age 10, misty eyes, murky mind,
when i examined your text for the first time wondering how your
work could be so perfect (deuteronomy), so holy but
so holey. how you could be so perfect but so
human, jealous and arrogant and always leaving things unfinished. silence
is a betrayal i received from you and in turn what
i believed, in that
pregnant pause between two acquaintances when they
have depleted their wells of small talk. silence is
what i wanted to plant below the dirt of
the subconscious, seeds of betrayal that might eventually blossom
into an answer, but instead
silence is what i learned
from teenagers who believe like me, and from my
parents when i asked,
but what about my jewish education, my islamic education,
my sikh, hindu, taoist,
pagan, agnostic,
human
education?
and got a “because we’re not them” hiding in front of a
secret "because we weren't raised like them." your
words were stricken into my mortal skin, lord
or lords or lack thereof. i don’t want to believe
that the good news is a family heirloom inherited
transmitted generation by generation by
megaphone and spilled blood, but i do want
to believe that we were made
in the arrogant, jealous,
godlike image of someone who will
apologize soon for not breaking the silence.
thy will be done, lord,
even if you do not show yourself to do it.
-
sincerely, a disciple of humanity