Back to Mind and Matter index
Previous poem - Beating Time
DISSATISFACTION
When we say, as we do
sometimes, 'I am lost', we might
wonder who
did the losing.
Who was the old,
poverty-stricken woman
who lost a coin?
Or the shepherd who lost
one of his sheep -
and the two of them ran
frantically about the place, searching
even as God ran
frantically
after me.
That is the image
God himself
has given us - God
frantic for the loss
of something that was His,
something He Himself
had made, had fashioned, lovingly,
breathing into it His own
spirit, His own breath, and then
it turned its back on Him.
He couldn't see
its lovely face.
It withered up
and disappeared. Oh what a loss!
We think of God as impassible, but
what then do we make
of the desperate, jilted
lover
of the Book of Hosea?
There are those
who think of God's wrath as infinite,
demanding an infinite
satisfaction,
but what if, instead, we see
God's sorrow as infinite,
beyond any sorrow
we can possibly conceive? God
weeping, God howling
over the loss
of me?
But how else can we explain
that whole ridiculous story we repeat
year after year - the birth,
the baptism, the preaching, the
death - God,
crawling about the floor.
looking under the furniture, turning the room
upside down, hunting
for the lost coin, the thing He
needs, loves, longs after, beyond
all possible, reasonable, measuring? But then
why would we exist at all
if God was not
an infinite, an eternal
dissatisfaction?