Jack Pelham

Surely there is nothing wrong
With either my church or yours.

By the most peculiar coincidence,
I know of a great many churches
That adamantly remind the world
That no one can earn his own salvation,
And zero churches that teach that he can.

Now let us watch the man and see
Whether he takes a notion
To make himself any better
By use of whatever he learns along the way—
Or what excuse he gives if he does not.

Something tips the balance
From a matter-of-fact acknowledgment
Of what the others are doing wrong
To a bitter rage about it.

And though I cannot say what all may cause it,
It seems to happen most commonly
When one’s own shortcomings and sins
Have been removed from the equation.

It is the dream of a lifetime for so very many
That they could have a life detached from
The reality of cause-and-effect—
Such that they could be as careless
Or as stubborn or as rash as they like,
And never have those chickens come home to roost.

And they will invest their lives in that dream,
Enlisting the help of concoctions, clerics, and counselors
As needed to dull their minds—
And all the while, calling him the heretic
Who points out the realities of the very God
They claim to worship.

Though it may seem complex,
Their problem is quite simple:
They do not like this Reality into which God
Has set their lives, and are unwilling
To be accountable for their choices.

*The painting is Sophie Anderson’s No Walk Today. See the credits here.

His party is right, he tells us,
And the other one is wrong—
And they really ought to know better, the idiots.

And for the life of him, he can’t fathom how anybody
Could be that gosh-darn stupid and blockheaded.

And he thanks God he’s not one of them.

And now, dear reader,
Having told you this much,
I leave it to you to discern
From the information given
Whether this man is
A Democrat or a Republican.

What does it say about us
That so many are afraid to ask?

Is it not that we are somehow
Afraid of the answers?

And really, who would want
To live that way—
Scared of reality?

Life in the constant smog
Can make people forget
What a clear day looks like.

Many will reason that Adam and Eve
Had not been ready to receive
The knowledge of good and evil,
And simply partook too soon of something
That would have been altogether
Proper for them—somehow—at a later time.

But I have lately come to wonder
Whether it had not been the very plan of God
That they should begin right away in that
Cavalier discovery of those two ways in which
They had been created naked—
And of what all was to be done about it.

It was the first grand demonstration day—
The result of which being that most of us
Did get dressed in the one way—

Even if having as yet little clue as to the second,
And going around half naked while fully clothed.

Finding no hope
In the beginning,
Some turn to the end—
Clamoring over the Revelation
And eager to find in it—
Or perhaps to imagine—
Something more promising than
That tired, old Genesis—
Long-since abandoned
As of no particular intrigue.

For they are not interested in
Living out their own quests
For which they were made—
But in slipping in upon
The glorious ending
Of someone else’s.

And they have missed—
I think—
The very point of being.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,…

Genesis 1:26a. NIV. See chapter.