know or don’t understand.
You pause,
Contemplating your next question.
How do we come to know this God and his love?
And the nailed man replies
There are many paths to God
And the best path is through me.
Why is that so when there are many paths?
Well, I am instructed to say,
With our path we promise the good man
Eternal life, with life after death in heaven
A wonderful place of goodness and light
And whatever you enjoy most
Along with all the other good, believing people.
Whereas unbelieving, bad people face eternal
damnation and pain
In hell
Along with all the other bad people
Suffering in the worst way they can possibly imagine.
You are sure you are a good man so you ask
But how can I be certain?
You will need faith
Blind faith and trust
In this, our message.
The music stops
The light streams down
You are stunned.
You see
The stark, archaic unreality
Of this doctrine
In the world around you
You turn to go
The voice whispers behind you
Remember
Blind faith and trust.
You walk into the marble foyer of the office tower
To the lifts and up forty floors
To the observation level.
Perhaps there will be meaning when you can see
The city all around you
Like a god?
The doors open and you move to the glass wall.
You see the city spread before you
Huge and complex
Patterns of humanity
Energy and movement
Cars creeping like ants
Through the box buildings.
You know there is order in this apparent chaos,
Somehow it works.
Man is restless and boundlessly creative
But do the blue sky, the distant green rolling hills
And the still sea of the bay beyond
Beckon you to a greater reality?
The cold, black, starry night sky
Spreads from horizon to horizon.
You look up.
You know that there are billions of people
Feeling, touching, living
On this airy, wet, rocky speck
In this one galaxy
In time and space
In infinity
So you ask this universe where is meaning?
The dark void whispers to you
You live in
An expanding cosmology
Of fields and forces
Matter and energy
Everywhere
Popping in and out of existence
Uncertainty and probability
Everywhere.
The classical absolute
Clockwork universe
Of touch and feel
Common sense
And blind religious faith
In an all powerful God.
Gone.
You live in
A universe of
Rubbery space/time
Mass energy equivalence
Light speed constancy
And a hoped for unity of all
But still one arrow of time
Flying into the future.
A universe created from a point of nothing.
A big bang.
Space expanding
Relentlessly
Curved
In and out
Cooling
But all hanging on to glorious
Symmetry
The stars probe your consciousness
And in the stillness
You are overawed by the immensity and potential simplicity,
The huge energies
Of it all.
Gradually,
