Jack Pelham

I have seen the camps adopt a truth
The others reject, and still
Bring ruin upon themselves,
Either by way of not embracing it fully,
Or of not letting go of some other thing
They have yet got wrong.

Some are so full of themselves
And of the culture of the camp
That they could read the whole Bible,
Stem to stern, and never perceive
That the camp and God have
Different ideas about what is evil.

Others perceive it somewhat,
In glimpses now and then, but will not
Come out from them and be separate,
Finding the staying preferable
To any wholesale reform, and
Hoping it is not unforgivable.

But others still have managed
To slip the bonds of camp,
To discover all the better
For themselves what God thinks—
Where there are no guards to quash
Such investigation, and no one
To please but God alone.

And having found the truths
The camp obscures,
Why would they ever go back,
Except to preach an unwelcome truth,
Or to try to escape it once again?

The reason the camps keep the truth
At arm’s length is that
Is that it pleases them neither
To please God, nor to admit
That they do not.

Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
    and sweet for bitter!

Isaiah 5:20. NIV.

The one presumes to be a member of the organization
Without doing what the members
Are all supposed to do.

And you’re not supposed to notice—
Not supposed to call them out on it.
And when you do, here comes the other.

INTERVIEWER: “So, Freddy, you had 84 years to live down on the Earth. What did you spend your time doing?”

FREDDY: “Oh, it was great! I spent most of my time defending the status quo and encouraging people to feel positive about how things were.”

Why will a people languish
While regarding as holy a text
They will not take to heart?—
A text they will neither study
Nor implement as it deserves?—
A text they will not learn themselves,
Even as they insist that others should do?

What is this brain, this living machine,
Ever striving to make sense of things,
Even when working unsupervised?

And who is this idiot that has charge of it—
Morally stupid beyond what he is
Willing to admit, and clueless as to
The great value of well-regulated
Good sense and reliable reason?

Let us all suppose that he should
Someday take a notion to become
The better steward of this treasure,
And put it at last to better use.

She’s all but lost—
This idea that won’t die,
But won’t live, either—

This Great Experiment
On whether the people
Could rule themselves
Coming down to the question
Of whether they would rule themselves—
That is, whether they were willing.

NOTE: Here are the words to a section of a choral suite I’ve been working on. It’s about an episode from my distant family history—a tortured soul who tortured others. She died circa 1915, and from her came some who loved and some who hated.

The Creeping

Hers, the suffering soul
Passed it on, don’t you know,
As do so many souls
Who break the Golden Rule.

When you give the man a Bible to take home and read,
And he comes back, having found no particular hope
In the message of repentance and obedience,
But only in the glorious message of eternal life,
He has shown you that he does not believe
In the real Jesus, but in a fake one more to his liking.

It’s been about two thousand years
Since the inspired pen was stilled.
And while it may be both intriguing
And fashionable to sit and wonder
At what might happen just any minute now,
Would not a wise people, puzzling over
How long it’s been, consider also
The alternative possibility
That God has had his life-giving say already—
Once and for all—
And that there is neither any subsequent
Chapter coming, nor any need for such?

Suppose we had mistaken the climax of it all
For some glorious event, yet future,
When really, the point is that we each
Should choose, in gratitude for what He has done,
To volunteer ourselves to be like Him
For as long as we are on this Earth—
That we might venture to walk in that Image
That was decreed for our kind in the beginning—
And lived out for us in the flesh
By the Way, the Truth, and the Life himself.

Suppose we had been put here to make the most
Of what we have been given already,
Rather than to wait on Him
To give us something further yet.

So many of us spend our lives
Waiting on Him to bring to fruition
Something for which he is
Waiting on each of us.

And to our shame, we would have
Understood this already
Had we been diligently studying
All the writings He has delivered to us,
Rather than wishing for Him
To do something new.

I don’t mean to suggest that if only
Humankind would finally
Get their act together,
God would finally do some new and
Spectacular thing on this Earth.

No, I’m suggesting that he has
Already made his spectacular gesture
And sounded the call once for all,
And gives us each a lifetime in which
To respond to it as we will.

I’m suggesting that God has had his say,
And that now is not the time
To be waiting on him to do something more,
But the time for us to show our response
To what he has done already
By how we choose to live.