Spiritual Sunday – Father’s Day
African American poet Thylias Moss has this wonderful poem about how God improved after he had, and became, a son. Moss would agree with those theologians who see the God as a character who evolves in the course of the Bible.
Another way of putting this is that humankind’s understanding of God has evolved over time, with the Bible reflecting those changes. God may not have changed, but we have.
In any event, Moss has written a compelling poem, capturing us in all our vulnerable humanity and our transcendent longing. I particularly like the moment when, by entering Mary’s womb, God becomes more feminine. And how, by going through the evolutionary stages (ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, as the biologists put it), he chooses to come out human, with all that this entails.
A Man
How handsome he was, that man who did not court the girls fawning all over him as if he’s already saved them, it’s my leg, one said, raising her hem as she’d raised it in dreams he knew of, for everything reached him as prayer, my leg, Sir, is not perfect although as he looked, it glistened and the blood became more productive. He did not date, nor rendezvous in tunnels and tents, did not kiss except to heal, did not harass, malign nor mutilate; threw no stones and he was a man; never forget that he was a man, that being a man improved him. Before the mothering. He was a solo act ramming omnipotence down the throats of Ramses, Job, all the sinning nobodies of Sodom. He was feared before he was born a triplet of flesh completing the one vaporous, the other heavy and strict; now he’s desirable, vulnerable; in the mother he visited stages of: fig, fish, pig, chicken, chimp before settling irrevocably on a form more able to strive. This was a more significant time in darkness, gestation of forty weeks, than three days in a hillside morgue; he learned maternal heartbeat and circulation of her blood so well they became dependency, and so he learned that some radiance is not his, hers came in large part just from being Mary—how content she was even before pregnancy, betrothed, blushing to ripen the fields; content even before she knew of angels, and now, with this mound of baby, she was parent of a world whose prospering she encouraged, activity of fish, magma, sulfur, the earth striving just as she did. He was a man yet the usher of miracles, preaching on a mountain where reverberation gave him the power of five thousand tongues, yet not a big man, not athletic, ordinary looking except for that glow and doves circling him in the desert, doves that had been vultures earning their transfiguration by consuming decaying meat just as he ate all the sin; for that flattery, he bid them dip their feathers in his eye, drawing into them that sweet milk around the iris. He was a man when he began to understand love, erasing the lines between Gentile, Jew, and invited any who wanted to come to his father’s house for bottomless milk, honey, ripe fruit, baskets of warm bread and eggs, wine, live angels singing. Weary revelers could lay their heads on his breast, he said, needing intimacy; he thinks as a man, therefore he is a man and good times, memories can be adequate heaven. He knows the distance a man is from his father, how likely it increases till the deathbed; he knows what a man knows the now and here, and can be called by name, and can be wounded, and must struggle, and must be proud every now and then or could not continue, must be worth something, must be precious to himself and preferably to at least one other, must be, in these thousands of post-Neanderthal years, improving, must have more potential, becoming not only more like God, but more like what God needs to become, so moves also, so God moves also because a man moves.