This won't make much sense without reading the poem first, so here it is up front.
The God Who Loves You
Carl Dennis
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.
The collection this comes from is called "Practical Gods" and is quite preoccupied with religion - Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, the Greek and Roman myths. Any and all of those score points with me. (It's the modernists who shrugged off religion as an opiate that really get under my skin, incurious bantamweights who make Gene Roddenberry look like an intellectual.)
But one of the things I love most about this poem is that the titular god is not a god at all. He doesn't seem particularly omniscient or confident. He's not the biblical God or Allah or another particular deity you could name. He does seem to be personified or at least anthropomorphized, so it's not as likely to be Shinto or a pantheistic point of view.
It seems that he's you, if you were somewhat more self-possessed and passionate, more concerned than you are with your life. If you want to get snarky about it, maybe he's Jiminy Cricket or the good angel on your right shoulder.
But there is certainly a tenderness and care that seems worth cultivating, if not a part of you then an appeal to some aspect of our personalities well in need of some attention. So maybe the god who loves you is just some self-help aphorism of how, "You should treat yourself better and love yourself more."
It stings a little, there could be some truth in that.
But I appreciate how much more affectionate and empathetic Dennis' god is than the average WASP portrayal which seems to get played out every time there's an abortion or gay rights rally. This seems more like Jesus weeping over his people who he longs to gather to him like a mother hen gathers her chicks.
I guess that makes my faith soft and wimpy. Maybe I would prefer to see Jesus weeping and not binding cords (but the rage of Jesus is another topic for another time).
I guess I'm not up to the task of destroying every falsehood and bringing this world under the dominion of the Almighty.
I'd like to leave the destroying and conquering to the Almighty if it's all the same to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment