It seems incomprehensible to think that God does not exist; even though God is a mystery. The question is, "how does God reveal herself / himself?" D.H. Lawrence's Creed presents his belief. It is:

That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.

We need to cherish the glimpses we receive as strange gods come and go.

Chuck

I intend the title "Entire Dilemma" to mean the existential dilemma we each face. In the 1960s I experienced an intellectual revolution of thought and especially religious thought. I had just walked away from the Catholic Church, and joined the Unitarian Church. My friend Dr. Erle Fitz introduced me to--Bugenthal, J.F.T.1965. The Search for Authenticity: An existential-analytic approach to Psychotherapy. Bugenthal's book focused on the existential dilemma we each face. This dilemma is: we are, finite, able to choose and act, and exist in relatedness to others. There is no more. No one has ever come back after dying to tell what the experience is like on the other side of the death-threshold. Existence is a mystery, or, existence is mystery. Freud referred to organized religion, as “mass delusion," and Marx referred to it as an “opiate of the people.” Those portrayals may seem a bit harsh and cynical, but, nonetheless, it is puzzling that people believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible since there is no evidence to support such a contention. People believe in the Bible because they have an emotional need to do so. Many scholars, including Albert Schweitzer, have searched for an historical Jesus without success.

Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior tells what I refer to as--the allegory of the knot:

“Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore.”

Kingston says that if she lived in China she would have been an outlaw knot-maker. We are blinded by fear so we pretend that we know where we will go when we die. Let's keep the knots simple and pass these simple knots on from generation to generation.

You might ask in Burkard fashion, "What's your point?" My point is: it is a mystery.

The title of this blogger is taken from Michael Burkard's poetry collection of the same name. In honor of this his poem "A Point" is presented. While this poem is not the title poem of the collection it is more in accord with the rai·son d'être for this blog.
A POINT

All you need is a point.
It seems that it has no dimension.
But that point can become God.
Any God.

---And so the man stopped.
The road glistened in the rain.
Sex was shining for someone
somewhere in the block.

And the woman sat there, at the back
of her store, wondering why
she never bought the house,
the small white one across the river.

And the other man thought about
the limits of confession,
brother against brother,
river to river---

one could end up at a point
and still not
be at the end
---end is such a small drop

like the end in sex,
the end of buying,
the end of the house
where the brothers lived.

I am using "Entire Dilemma" to mean the existential dilemma we each face.

Chuck