Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow

I share here with you one of my favorite poems but I can’t really tell you why I love it so much. I don’t really understand it. But, it speaks powerfully to me and I share it just in case it speaks to one of you.

It is about reality and its mysterious origin and nature. Reality is just mind-boggingly complicated and we cannot wrap our mind around it, try as we may. I love science and I am so glad we are trying to “wrap our mind around it” but I really thing we will find at the end of our pursuits what Einstein described as “a mystery.” And Einstein said that it was this mystery which gave rise to his “religious sentiment.”

I think we should always be thinking, exploring, hungering, questing but in the end we will have to recognize that mystery and, perhaps, bow down and sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

HOUSE
By E. L. Mayo

House
Vast and ambiguous
Which was before we were

Did you
Build yourself and then grow populous
By taking thought, or

Did someone leave a tap on long ago
In You
Which with its spatter

Affirms at the very least a householder
Who will return at the last if only to
Turn off the water.

Damn those human limitations!

I really love e e cummings. He was just so damned contrary and here I am stuck in my plain-vanilla, humdrum life! It ain’t fair!  He didn’t even obey punctuation! How in the hell did he get by with that? His teachers must have wanted to beat his butt.

Here is one of my favorite of his poems:

WHEN GOD DECIDED TO INVENT

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

I really do not understand this poem. But it grabs me. The key to the poem is the limitation of the cause-and-effect world that we live in, a relic of that damned time-space continuum. And, I don’t understand that “continuum” either! Not consciously, anyway. But, I know that cummings realized the limitations that we live in and I know he must have found them very frustrating.

Ultimately, the only thing we have is “why” and that brings us face to face with the profound mystery of life. I’m made to think of Einstein’s observation that he had found that at the heart of everything was an “impenetrable mystery”, noting that this experience is what brought to his heart “religious sentiment.” I choose the term “God” but “my god”, how that term is abused.