Out of Nothing

In Uganda, a country torn by war and unhappiness, street artists are turning potholes into works of art. I couldn't resist the beauty of this metaphor.

Explorer

Rain in Cracks

Like rain blown through a screen
you sprayed into my house
riding turning winds,
beady and spread,
as slippery as thin,

and asked me nothing.
Didn't you know

like patient cracks in walls
I have sat and worried,
have bullied and picked
an atom's edge
to break and spread the rift?

So ask me nothing.
Surely you know

the livid storm outside
will seep along hair lines,
fractures stretched to us,
brittle and wet,
and splay us with a gust.

Believing

Recently, I was talking to a teenager interested in Christianity. He wanted to believe but was scared to make the step - to give up all the things a believer in Christ must. I was struck by how crucial it is for all of us to open our eyes at some time in our life and see that everything we accept, religioius or not, about the world we accept on faith. That we must stand at the cross between Frost's two roads in the wood, look down them as long as we need and then choose one and reject the other. Whatever we choose we are only moving from a blind faith into a seeing one.

What amazes me, is how many people, religious or not, are so incapable of seeing this. They take what is theirs on faith as being true in and of itself. But living is believing and believing is a frightening, uncertain, risky thing. Unless your eyes are shut.

The "Rational Response Squad" and their "Blasphemy Challenge" have shown me recently how much of the "enlightened", anti-religious community go on believing and trusting and living by faith without, apparently, knowing it. Check out this critique and discussion of the film "The God Who Wasn't There" (denying the Historic Jesus and villifying Christianity) - it's amazing to me to see that the response on behalf of the Atheist communtiy is so much more emotional and defenselessly dogmatic than the Christian one.

As John's gospel tells us over and over in different ways, "unless you believe you will never believe."